Yeah, I live in a legal state, but I am not ‘registered’ as a medical grower, and have no intention of doing that. My inquiries will be for my fish tank 
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One thing that is probably not anything to do with your changes but caused very large PH fluctuations in my tank was an ionising mist generator. I got one to humidify the room during early veg. It was not the discrete sort with it’s own tank, it was the sort that floats in your pond.
At it’s most basic level, a PH pen is a very sensitive electrical charge reader. It measures the tiny ion exchange between the outside liquid and a reference liquid inside the probe across a thin glass bulb. I suspect the ions in the pond mister messed up this sensitive measuring circuitry.
It did not affect the readings of a PH pen, but when using a mains powered doser, which has to have at some point a ground to earth, even using power isolation circuits, I suspect the ions (which are little bits of electrically charged stuff) wanted to earth themselves through the device and this made my PH probe read about one whole point too high. When I turned it on, my PH went from 5.8 to 6.8. When I double checked with a pen, it still read 5.8…
It was very obvious when looking at the PH graph. Mister turns on, PH shoots up. Mister turned off, PH settles to nearly normal, although this took longer than the rise.
One really bad thing it did though was to permanently make the chip that reads the probe lose it’s ability to report stable readings. Instead of being stable to ±0.005, it had a variance of about ±0.2-0.3 and this did not go away when I got rid of the pond mist generator, changed the nutrient solution, or even tried a different PH probe with the same chip.
This happened even when the mister was in it’s own bucket of RO water. It seemed like the ions went into the air, and were attracted to the largest place that could neutralise their charge, which was my main tank.
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Wow. Very interesting results - but not even close to anything I would have expected.
I can see it damaging the probe or contaminating it in some way, but off the top of my head, I cant think of any mechanism that would let some extra ions in the water damage a chip like that. Strange but interesting at the same time 
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Just to up-date my situation - its been raining a lot more lately and my water has been changing how it reacts as far as PH.
The rez seems to be a little more stable, and the PH rise after PHing down , is less severe. The amount of PH rise after the HPA nozzles spray the water is also less dramatic. When I check the water collected in the root chamber, it had been raising more than a full point over the last several weeks. However, the last two days its only going up .6 to .8. Im going to have to change my target PH in the rez from 4.6-4.7 up to around 5.0 pretty soon.
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As far as I can tell, there must be a small circuit or similar in the IC that limits variance in the readings and this may have been shorted out by the charge in the water shorting through the IC to earth.
It does not take much electricity to mess up the very delicate circuits in a silicon chip, and if all it did was cause a resistor to become a short circuit, or a tiny capacitor to become a short circuit, that would make a stabilising circuit into just a piece of wire or not conduct. That would explain what I have noticed. EDIT : This would also be almost unnoticeable to the chip.
My tank is plastic and so would allow static charge to build up in the solution, and most of the other equipment in there is designed to not be electrically reactive, central heating pumps and aquarium pumps are all there is.
If none of those provides a route to earth then even a relatively small static charge building up over time can easily mess up sensitive equipment.
My surprise was that it persisted after the mister was removed, and affected the chip, not the probe. Also that this effect was permanent. I have put those chips to one side so I can examine them later, when I have time.
I have had a thought about the PH level you store your nutrient solution at. If you have your nutrient solution at under 5PH, does this not cause lockout and precipitation of nutrients in your tank?
You may find that only certain elements drop out and this may cause odd nutrient deficiencies.
In case anyone else has this issue, the type of mister was a “Mist Maker Negative Ion Ioniser Humidifier Fragrance Diffuser”
It is a chrome disc with 5 ceramic ultrasonic discs embedded in it, and the product code is DK5-24 (5 discs, 24V). 10M lead and uses 120W.
The blurb says “To decorate the pond, fountain, garden and swimming pool with swirling white mist. It’s beautiful and mysterious.”
It may explain odd issues with no other cause.
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More interesting info. I didnt think the ultrasonic misters ionized the water/mist at all. I was under the impression they were purely mechanical.
Does this particular one add some voltage to the water to ionize it in addition to the vibrating plates, or is that just marketing hype?
I dont think Im getting any precipitation in the nutes, but I cant be 100% sure of that. The rez itself looks perfectly clear.
I periodically drain the accumulator tank when I top off the rez, and every thrid or fourth time, I check volumes by collecting it in a container. So far, I have seen no signs of anything like that. The runoff I collect in the root chamber is also always crystal clear.
As far as plant problems, my main one has been drying out the roots way to often from trying to get the flow rate down too low. Its hard to judge what other problems there may or may not be when you have killed off half your roots through stupidity and running out of LITFA!
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My impression as well, but:
JP-58-6-1618.pdf (252.7 KB)
The Lenard effect is one of the
natural ionization process observed at waterfalls [22–24].
Charged air ions are produced due to spray electrification
of water. Small water drops carry extra electrons
weakly attached to the drops, and relatively big water
drops and bulk water are charged positively, losing some
electrons to the small water drops. There is no production
of ozone in spray electrification of water [25]. The
Lenard effect is a safe mechanism for air ionization.
Not certain of how accurate the study is when they say things like “electrification” but it doesn’t sound too far fetched that charged particles / charge transfer could be produced from the ultrasonic misters.
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I haven’t fully read some of the comments in this thread but thought I’d post a couple of interesting plots that may be of interest (to the charge effect thoughts).
Larry and I were looking into dissolved oxygen a little while ago. In this, I was capturing long sequences of monitoring data including PH and ORP. In a couple instances, lightning storms passed through the region and we captured the result of lightning strikes and the effect on the measurement circuitry. PH and ORP are isolated, no ground bond to the solution itself (at least nothing purposeful). Notice, in particular, the effect on the ORP with the gradual recovery:
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LOL I agree. Im not sure after reading that, if these are just translation issues, or if its a marketing promo for the mister they were “testing”
One of the mechanisms of purifying air is ionizing
the indoor air. Negatively charged air ions are generally
known to be good for human health, and positively
charged air ions bad for health [4,9–18]. Negative air ions
are also known to activate cell functions, stabilize the
emotional state and promote the recovery from fatigue
by preventing acidification of blood [16–19] and improving
aerobic metabolism [17].
That quote sounds like its at least part folk tales and mysticism to me, but the Lenard Effect is real, so maybe
Thinking about that - it sounds like the smaller droplets, and larger droplets, would each repel each other droplets of similar size, but be attracted to droplets that were larger or smaller.
I remember reading an old thread somewhere where a grower was trying to work out a way to force a charge on the droplets so he could keep them suspended longer.
Based on the Lenard Effect, you could just use a pair of charged plates - one at the top of the root chamber and one at the bottom and adjust the polarity accordingly. Makes me wonder if there is enough charge to make that practical? Im thinking it would be tricky since our solutions are relatively conductive with the nutes added. I suspect there would be too much current flow through the body of the chamber to maintain a decent voltage differential. Plus you would be generating free oxygen and hydrogen. On top of that would be electrolysis issues unless you used $$ electrodes.
Very interesting turn to this discussion
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I had forgotten about that too <<<< what memory?
Good question as to why the ORP would have such a gradual a recovery when the PH was much faster.
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Well, I’m not going to attempt this. 
But since you are already building a particle accelerator… 
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Yes, don’t know. Could be a number of reasons with one being building up a charge for some reason (e.g. the large voltage gradient from lightning ionizes things). Other reasons being just how the overall system is wired, ground reference and paths (somewhat inter-related), noise. But, the slow response on the ORP tends to say, not noise, Instead something “real” might be occurring. MicroDoser’s theory is making me think about this again. Needs some thought.
The sample interval is 1 minute. The PH recovered in approximately that time span. So, it was fairly fast.
The ORP recovery, on the other hand, was 30+ minutes. 
From Atlas Scientific:
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hehehehehe maybe I could wire up the roots to be an inverted Jacobs Ladder!
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Now, that would be exciting and would be guaranteed a crack pot award . Free PH down, too. Hmmm, I’ve always had aspirations to build a Jacob’s ladder. There’s a first time for everything.
Starting to really verve off-topic now but I was watching a YouTube video where the author had a chamber filled with a water mist. Two probes on opposite sides of the chamber were pulsed with a high voltage potential between them. The the mist would rapidly collapse as precipitation. I assume ionizing the vapor. Nothing about PH but pretty cool otherwise.
Not a great video but (kinda looks like he’s blowing on the mist but whatever):
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As far as the off topic - its my thread and I dont care - so PLEASE NO ONE MESS WITH IT!!
I went through a hi voltage phase in high school - Tesla coils, van der graph generators, and Jacobs Ladders. The Van der graph generators were mostly a bust. I just couldnt seem to make one that worked well at all. Part of the problem Im sure was using coffee cans where the metal sphere should have been
The final versions of my Tesla coils were pretty cool but the results were still kind of wimpy. Weak sparks that didnt stretch very far.
Then my uncle, who was in charge of building maintenance on a large office tower in San Fransisco, gave me a used commercial neon sigh transformer. I forget exactly, but it was somewhere close to 15kv or 18 kv, and huge! The thing was like 18" long, 12" tall and weighed like 30 pounds! Now I was really cooking That thing would generate thick, fat, loud arcs at least 6"-8" long. When I built the ladder, the arc at the top could get to over a foot long and made an incredible noise - just like in the sci-fi movies. It would also twist and coil and do all sorts of cool things.
Two tips though - First - If you build a long ladder - like 2 feet tall or more - the wire for the ladder needs to be very stiff or the wires will be pulled together and short out. Molten copper goes flying every where when that happens. Not good. 3/16" or larger piano wire works well. Regular copper does not. Even with the stiff wire, it will be pulled together to some degree. That makes the wires oscillate back and forth and sometimes the arc will break free and the ionized trail will go up in the air all by itself for a short distance. Very impressive!
Second - expect a call from the FCC or, if you are lucky, a neighbor who happens to be a HAM operator. Turns out if you have a long ladder for an antenna, and pump 20 or 30 kilowatts through it, it will make all the TV’s in the neighborhood go crazy with static. It was also playing heck with my neighbors ham gear. He tracked the source to my house with DF gear, and knocked on the door. That was a very interesting discussion with him (ex military officer with a LOT of command presence), and my parents. My dad was kind of upset too because he was just about to go buy a new TV thinking our was on the fritz.
That was the end of my jacobs ladder, but it was the start of my electronics hobby. He was a member of MARS - the Military Amateur Radio Society. He showed me all around his garage and got me hooked up with free military surplus radio gear I could play with, gave me a copy of the Radio Amateurs Hand book, taught me morse code, etc. This was back in the mid 60’s, so the surplus stuff was all vacuum tubes of course.
Fun times
That fog video is interesting. Wish he had supplied more specs. I cant tell if the fog is precipitating or being repelled or attracted to the probes?
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You were much braver than I, Mr. Tesla. A couple of high voltage kisses was enough to give me the shakey hands syndrome whenever HV is involved.
I recall one incident where a “friend” (in a college dorm) had a high voltage transformer. For fun, he would grab the HV output with one of his hands where he was sufficiently insulated from ground by his shoes. Then, with his friends, they’d create a human chain with each person grabbing each others free hand. Each receiving a small shock as they came up to potential. I had no idea why they though this was fun. I guess they were proving theory?
But, the fun ended rather dramatically when someone walking out of the shower, soaking wet with no shoes, near/contacting a metal door frame, was grabbed by an individual in the HV chain.
Blinding flash and … a tooth popped out of his mouth! 
Yeah. More reasons for me to stay low voltage. Otherwise, that guy survived the “fun”. With a missing tooth, of course. Don’t know where the instigator is these days, probably works for the government.
Great tips on the Jacobs ladder, et al. Good broadband noise generator. So, you get several things from this. 1) cool as heck to watch 2) a couple of SHTF techniques (comm inteference + HNO3) 3) general respect for HV. So, with the jacob ladder roots, you’ve quadrupled the “subversiveness” of the plant? 
Precipitation, I’d think. A cloud chamber may provide some insight, idk.
HAARP?
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LOL Im sure beer or pot was involved somewhere
Thats nasty! I was too stupid, and too intrigued by the special effects, to be properly afraid despite numerous shocks. Never lost a tooth though! That might have been enough to slow me down!
hehehehehe <<<< evil laugh from any mad scientist movie you ever saw
Interesting point about the cloud chamber. But the charged particles passing through a cloud chamber cause condensation in a super saturated air - humidity at or just above 100%. His video looked like it was just clearing out or moving the fog.
Makes me want to do some tests, but I dont have any hi voltage sources at the moment. Amateur cloud chambers form the fog by rapidly cooling very humid air. I would guess that those droplets are not charged, or have relatively low charges compared to droplets generated my those pizo fog generators and the Lenard Effect.
I would expect my HP nozzles create a decent charge on the droplets. There has to be a lot of shear forces when they form that way.
I can picture the charged droplets reacting in two possible ways when subjected to a hi voltage discharge. The plus vrs minus charge differential on the droplets could increase, causing them to be more attracted to each other, and making them agglomerate, and therefore get heavier so they fall to the bottom faster - or - The positively and negatively charged droplets would be repelled and attracted to their respective, but oppositely charged electrodes. I can see either thing clearing out the fog. That video wasnt clear at all, but it looked kind of like the droplets were being pushed in one direction - away from the electrode.
Im also curious if the salts we have in our nutes (that means fee ions in the water already) would change how the droplets react - or just make it more dangerous
Edit: silly me - clouds form the same way in the atmosphere as they do in a could chamber - so your probably right about that.
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I’m thinking more along the lines, the beer and pot smokers were busy socializing, watching from the sidelines, and being generally amused.
I’m not entirely believing that video the more I look at it. Looks suspect.
This one is a bit different but seems more credible and interesting:
http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/airthred.html
Some other random ones:
For the cloud chamber, which you’ve also explained, the idea is that a charged particle traveling through a super saturated atmosphere causes some of the molecules to become ionized. This encourages condensation locally. Or, probably from a physics standpoint, we change the thermodynamic equilibrium resulting in a change of the saturation point (reduced) and/or the water transitions from the gaseous to liquid phase for the same reason. Ugh, trying to get closer to a correct description, damn you thermodynamic thingies. I should have paid more attention in schooling but, alas, I was one of those sitting along the sidelines being generally amused at times.
But, I’m thinking, this can also occur at a larger scale where we already have visibly condensed water vapor as a starting point. Ionizing the vapor at this scale causes larger droplets to form leading to precipitation. At least, I think that would be the case. Or, maybe the e-field just moves the vapor droplets around causing them to collide and condense further?
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Awesome stuff you found! Love those videos. I may have to break down and get or make some sort of HV power supply just so I can play around with this. Im very curious to see how or if any of this applies to droplets in an HP Aero setup.
Im pretty sure the fog in all these videos is much smaller droplets than we use - probably sub 5 micron, so none of this may work with droplets that are an order of magnitude larger, but it would sure be fun to try it and see
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